The Death of Stalin

In the USSR in 1953, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Joseph Stalin is listening to a concert on the radio and orders that a recording of it be delivered to him. The concert has to be hurriedly repeated and recorded, but the pianist, Maria Yudina, hides a note to Stalin in the sleeve of the record, saying he has ruined the country. As Stalin reads the note in his dacha, he suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and becomes paralysed. The members of the Central Committee are alerted. The first to arrive is Interior Ministry (NKVD) head Lavrentiy Beria. He discovers and pockets Yudina's note, and proceeds to steal papers from a safe and give them to his men who are waiting outside the dacha. Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Georgy Malenkov arrives next. As Malenkov panics, Beria encourages him to take the leadership, hoping to use him as a puppet.

Moscow Party Head Nikita Khrushchev arrives with the rest of the Committee, except Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, whom Stalin had added to one of his lists of enemies the previous night. Beria closes off Moscow, has the NKVD take over city security duties from the Soviet Army, and replaces Stalin's list of enemies with his own list, reprieving Molotov. Khrushchev and Beria struggle for symbolic victories, including control over Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, and his unstable son, Vasily.

Stalin dies, and the Committee members rush back to Moscow. As soon as they leave NKVD troops arrive to loot Stalin's dacha and execute witnesses. Khrushchev goes to Molotov's home and attempts to enlist his support, but Molotov, a true believer in Stalinism, opposes any factionalism in the Communist Party. Beria buys Molotov's loyalty by releasing his wife, Polina Molotova, from confinement.

Malenkov is named Premier while being largely controlled by Beria. At the first Committee meeting following Stalin's death, Beria sidelines Khrushchev by putting him in charge of Stalin's funeral and suggesting the introduction of many of the liberal reforms Khrushchev had already planned. Stalin's body is laid in state in the Hall of Columns, while many political prisoners are released and restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church are loosened, earning Beria more popular support. Marshal Georgy Zhukov arrives and demands to know why the Soviet Army has been confined to barracks within Moscow.

Beria learns that Khrushchev has a passing acquaintance with Maria Yudina, who has been hired to play at the funeral, and threatens them both that he will reveal Yudina's note. Khrushchev approaches Zhukov, who agrees to provide the Army's support in a coup to overthrow Beria, but only if the Committee agrees.

To undermine Beria's popularity, Khrushchev orders the resumption of trains into Moscow, allowing thousands of mourners into the city. As Khrushchev has anticipated, the NKVD guards around the Hall fire on the crowd, killing 1,500 people. The Committee suggests scapegoating low-level NKVD officers, but because Beria believes any blame attached to security services will tarnish his reputation, he angrily threatens the Committee with incriminating documents he has collected on them. Enraged that Beria has ended the State's persecution of the Orthodox Church, Molotov secretly tells Khrushchev and Lazar Kaganovich that he will support the coup if they can enlist the support of the others, including Malenkov.

On the day of Stalin's funeral, Khrushchev lies to the Committee and Zhukov that he has Malenkov's support. The Soviet Army overwhelms the NKVD and takes up positions outside the conference room. Zhukov and his men arrest Beria, and Khrushchev coerces Malenkov into signing the papers for Beria's trial. In a kangaroo court Khrushchev and his allies find Beria guilty of treason and sexual assault, and execute him. As Beria's body is burnt, Khrushchev gives Svetlana a ticket to Vienna and assures her that her brother will be cared for. Several years later, Khrushchev, now leader of the Soviet Union, having removed his co-conspirators, attends a concert by Maria Yudina, while future leader Leonid Brezhnev watches him from the next row of seats.

• Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev
• Simon Russell Beale as Lavrentiy Beria
• Paddy Considine as Yuri Andreyev
• Rupert Friend as Vasily Stalin
• Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov
• Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov
• Andrea Riseborough as Svetlana Stalin
• Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov
• Adrian McLoughlin as Joseph Stalin
• Olga Kurylenko as Maria Yudina
• Paul Whitehouse as Anastas Mikoyan
• Paul Chahidi as Nikolai Bulganin
• Dermot Crowley as Lazar Kaganovich
• Daniel Fearn as Ivan Konev
• Luke D'Silva as Kirill Moskalenko
• Gerald Lepkowski as Leonid Brezhnev
• Richard Brake as Anatoly Tarasov

The project began development during the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Armando Iannucci was set as director and writer, alongside his The Thick of It co-writer Ian Martin. Production was due to begin in June, with Jeffrey Tambor, Steve Buscemi, Olga Kurylenko, Timothy Dalton, Toby Kebbell, Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine and Andrea Riseborough amongst the cast.[6] Production began on June 20, with Adrian McLoughlin, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs and Paul Whitehouse joining the cast. Dalton and Kebbell, who were originally respectively cast as Georgy Zhukov and Vasily Stalin, ultimately did not appear in the film.[7][8][9]

Production began 20 June 2016 and ended 6 August.[10]

Filming locations included Kyiv, Ukraine (for exteriors scenes and exterior of Public Enemies building and NKVD building), the United Kingdom (at Blythe House, Freemasons’ Hall and Alexandra Palace in London, Mongewell Park in Oxfordshire, Hammersmith Town Hall in London), and in Moscow, Russia, at the Red Gate Building.[11][12]

The soundtrack was composed by Christopher Willis. The score was written in the style of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich of the Stalin era.[13][14]

The Death of Stalin was released by eOne Films in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2017 and IFC Films in the United States on 9 March 2018.[15][16][1] The film was screened in the Platform section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.[17]

The Death of Stalin grossed $8 million in the United States and Canada and $16.6 million in other territories (including $7.3 million in the UK), for a worldwide total of $24.6 million.[3]

A number of academics have pointed to historical inaccuracies in The Death of Stalin. Iannucci has responded, "I’m not saying it’s a documentary. It is a fiction, but it’s a fiction inspired by the truth of what it must have felt like at the time. My aim is for the audience to feel the sort of low-level anxiety that people must have when they just went about their daily lives at the time."[32]

Historian Richard Overy has written that the film "is littered with historical errors", including:

• Molotov was not foreign minister when Stalin died. He had been sacked in 1949, but became foreign minister again in the post-Stalin reshuffle.
• Marshal (not Field Marshal) Zhukov was a local field commander when Stalin died, exiled to the provinces to satisfy Stalin's paranoid jealousy of him. He became deputy minister of defence in the post-Stalin government but was not the commander of the Soviet Army in March 1953.
• Khrushchev, not Malenkov, chaired the meeting to reorganise the government.
• Beria was arrested three months after Stalin died, not almost simultaneously, and that was precipitated by the 1953 East German Uprising, not a massacre of mourners in Moscow, which is actually based on the 109 who were trampled to death during the funeral. Furthermore, Beria was not head of the security forces, a job he gave up in 1946.[33]

Overy was most critical that the film did not appropriately honour those who died during Stalin's leadership. Iannucci said he "chose to tone down real-life absurdity" to make the work more believable.[34]

The Radio Moscow portion is a retelling of an apocryphal story first recorded in Solomon Volkov's book Testimony. But in Volkov‘s account it was Maria Yudina who was awakened in the middle of the night to be brought in to record, and the recording brought Stalin to tears, moving him to pay Yudina 20,000 rubles in appreciation. The story subsequently served as the loose basis for the 1989 BBC radio play The Stalin Sonata by David Zane Mairowitz. While the anecdote did have her send a letter to Stalin, she supposedly wrote to thank him for the money, adding that she would donate it to the restoration of a church and that she would be praying for Stalin's sins to be forgiven.[35] In addition, while the real Maria Yudina had been fired on one occasion for her ideological disagreements with the regime, her family had not been killed.

Another smaller historical aspect of the plot was modified for the film—the 1950 Sverdlovsk plane crash in which 11 players on the VVS Moscow ice hockey team died. In the movie Vasily Stalin and Anatoly Tarasov deal with a depleted Soviet Union national ice hockey team, complete with a reference to their star player Vsevolod Bobrov, who missed the flight. In actuality the crash happened on 5 January 1950, over three years before Stalin’s death.

The NKVD had been superseded by the MVD in 1946, almost seven years before the death of Stalin.[36]

Samuel Goff, at the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, while admitting that the film's historical discrepancies could be justified as helping to focus the drama, wrote that turning Beria into "an avatar of the obscenities of the Stalinist state" missed the chance to say "anything about the actual mechanisms of power."[37] Goff argued that Iannucci's approach to satire was not transferable to something like Stalinism and the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for."[37]

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